Business lobby is full of false bravado

The Canberra lobbying world has a dirty little secret: business just doesn’t get politics, and the industry is built on that ignorance.

More often than not, the disconnect between business and political reality isn’t much of an issue. Lobbyists wheel their naïve clients through politicians’ offices and are paid handsomely for what is little more than glorified door-opening. In return, the business figures feel influential even though they’ve done little more than whinge to a marginally relevant MP.

Meanwhile the real lobbying work goes on elsewhere in Canberra, not in the shiny marble halls of Parliament House but in far less glamorous surrounds, where myriad departmental officials actually develop and implement policy for their political masters. Lobbyists who want to deliver real policy outcomes, rather than simply act as political matchmakers, focus their efforts at this level.

But because door-opening is a relatively easy and considerably lucrative business, lobbyists often do very little to dissuade their business clients from the delusion that a few words in a politician’s ear is all that’s needed to get a favourable policy.

This can lead to the business sector – particularly the big end of town – believing it can muscle in on a government’s agenda regardless of the political issues at stake.

A good example is the recent call by senior businessman Roger Corbett for a double dissolution electionto overcome the “obstructionist” Senate. One would think that as a member of the Reserve Bank board and chairman of Fairfax Media Corbett would have a workable grasp of our political system.

However, if he did, Corbett would know that a DD election would likely increase the fractured nature of the Senate. The reduced quota for election to the upper house could result in even more independent, micro and minor party candidates being elected. Not to mention, of course, that on current opinion poll ratings, an election at this time would also see the defeat of the Abbott Government altogether.

Even if we set aside Corbett’s politically impractical call as the wishful thinking of an overly enthusiastic Liberal Party member, there are significant other examples of the business community simply not coming to grips with political imperatives.

Like Corbett, the business leaders that put their names to the statement have either deliberately ignored or simply missed the point. It was at least partly at the business community’s behest that the Abbott Government’s first budget went in so hard on economic reform. But only the Government has had to shoulder the community’s opprobrium since for doing so.

Even now, as the Government continues to struggle in the opinion polls after delivering the most unpopular budget in recent history, business continues to push it for policy changes that would amount to nothing short of electoral suicide if adopted in the current political environment.

Top of their wish list is workplace relations reform, yet only a government comprised of madmen or fools would propose this at a time when the unions’ successful WorkChoices campaign is still relatively fresh in the minds of Australian voters.

The other key reform being sought by business is tax reform, namely a cut in the corporate tax rate. This is behind the business push for an increase or broadening of the GST, which would improve the Government’s budget bottom line and consequently make a corporate tax cut more palatable to the broader community.

Even if that were true, the same research found 62 per cent “do not trust government to manage tax reform well enough to create a better system overall”.

This is the political reality that business must face: there is no point pressuring the Government to prosecute difficult reforms when the community either fears, distrusts or holds the Government in contempt.

As Crosby Textor co-founder Mark Textor explained in an interview over the weekend, political leaders like NSW Premier Mike Baird and NZ prime minister John Key are successful because they pass three threshold tests of trust with voters: Do I trust this person at his word? Can he do what he says in this political system? And, if this thing he wants to do goes wrong, is this person of a character that would care if someone slips through the cracks?

And in the absence of that trust? Textor says it needs to be co-opted from an unexpected but credible third party, such as when the Australian Council of Social Services backed the Howard Government’s campaign for the GST.

Reform-minded business leaders need to accept that it is pointless – if not counterproductive – to pressure a government to implement change that will result in electoral defeat. Even if such a government chose unpopular policy purity over political expediency, it’s likely a new incoming government would simply overturn the change to garner public support.

Calling Government MPs cowards for backing away from reform is not telling them anything they didn’t already know, but it’s still as useless as shouting into the wind. Business must accept that reform needs a level of trust in government that is currently missing, and that new coalitions of interest, involving sections of the community outside of business, must be formed to re-establish that trust.

It may make business leaders feel important and influential to berate the Government and grandstand for the media. But like lobbyists opening politicians’ doors for a living, doing so is nothing more than a pointless and hollow charade.